THE PHILOSOPHER’S STEAM
The Brusselton Incline is now in sight, so I will pause and look back whilst I regain breath. The horse of Troy was a very wonderful beast, and many strange things came out of it, for it was the strangest thing man had seen since the Ark. But years after Troy was burnt, a stranger thing was seen in Alexandria. It was called an aeolipile, a kind of rudimentary steam engine, which was invented by one, Hero, in 130 B.C. He used it to open and close the doors of a temple, yet it was eventually destined to open the portal of a new world, a glimpse of which would have sent Hero or Columbus completely out of their minds. Yet these greater doors remained closed for seventeen hundred years, when another, this time Battista della Porta, in the year 1601, re-discovered the power of steam.
In 1641, Marion de Lorme, accompanied by the Marquis of Worcester, visited the madhouse of the Bicêtre in Paris, and this is what he writes:—
“We were crossing the court, and I, more dead than alive with fright, kept close to my companion’s side, when a frightful face appeared behind some immense bars, and a hoarse voice exclaimed, ‘I am not mad! I am not mad! I have made a discovery that would enrich the country that adopted it.’ ‘What has he discovered?’ asked our guide. ‘Oh!’ answered the keeper, shrugging his shoulders, ‘Something trifling enough; you would never guess it; it is the use of the steam of boiling water.’”
Who was this maniac? It was Solomon de Caus, he had a vision whilst dabbling with steam vessels, and he had seen carriages and ships propelled by steam. This was too much for men dressed in half hose and doublets, or whatever was the tuxedo of their day. “Carriages driven by steam ... lock him up!” So he was locked up. But the idea lived on, and it grew. There was Giovanni Branca, Edward Somerset, Marquis of Worcester, then Thomas Savery, who, in 1698, obtained a patent for a water raising engine. There were others, Jean de Hautefeuille, who, in 1678, suggested the piston; Denis Papin, 1690, of cylinder and piston fame. At length Thomas Newcomen, 1705, something near success; others still, Humphrey Potter, Henry Beighton, but all waiting for the man. Then the man came in the form of a poor instrument maker, and the new Jerusalem of the steam age was Glasgow, for there did he work. This man was James Watt, who, having realized that the cylinder of an engine should always be as hot as the steam which entered it, in 1769 threw open the doors of the most stupendous epoch in economic history. The transmutation of heat into mechanical work had been discovered, it was the true stone of the philosophers, the “Open Sesame” to another age.